Should Wynn ever support other languages?

Some reasons why this is unfeasible:
- There is text everywhere in Wynncraft, because almost all information is presented to the player through text. These lines are not all organised into neat configuration files, they are scattered all around and it would take months just to catalogue them all. Examples include:
- Quest/Interaction Dialogue
- Quest/Interaction Helper Text
- Hardcoded lines that appear in chat
- Mob names
- Menu text (compass GUI, ability tree etc)
- Usable items stats/lore
- Every single item that you can have in your inventory at any point
- Quest stages
All of these are written exclusively in English, and a lot of the information in them cannot be directly translated to other languages. A lot of work would go into just figuring out how to represent the same information in an alternative language.

- Implementing a localisation menu. None of the systems that power all of those above mechanics were designed with providing alternative text in mind. Huge rewrites of the backend would be required just so that we can allow players to switch between seeing different languages of all of those lines, followed by huge rewrites of configuration files so that we can implement the translated text.

- Minecraft character rending. Probably a smaller problem, but a lot of languages use non-english alphabets with accented characters, special characters or straight up other alphabets. For a lot of these characters, Minecraft may not render them, render them very poorly, or they are already used in the resource pack for something else.

- Finding translators, ensuring they can actually translate, (potentially and likely) paying them, and then checking/QA-ing their work.

- The amount of translation needed which probably approaches hundreds of thousands of lines.

- Your comparison of working on something like to working on a major update is flawed as people mentioned above, any time spent working on this would mean less time to dedicate to updates which means an inactive content team (what would they be doing whilst all this is being implemented?), an unhappy playerbase, less player retention and less income for the sever.

- And then multiply all of the above steps for however many languages you want to implement.

I agree that translation is important to consider when designing a game and that in more modern video games they are often designed with it in mind, but the backend systems that power Wynncraft were kinda built up over a long time into what they are today and the work required to rewrite them so localisation could be implemented is already huge without even considering the cataloguing, translation, quality-assurance and implementing of the actual text.

 

Though I can't help but feel a bit ridiculed, this was exactly the reaction I was hoping this discussion would provoke. This is what I wanted, an organized set of arguments why it would be (nearly) impossible, instead of speculation or incomplete arguments. I won't bother trying to refute your comment, as I feel like this thread has served its purpose now. Lock pls <3